Spatial Hearing and Speech Intelligibility in Bilateral Cochlear Implant Users

Abstract

During the early stages of bilateral hearing through cochlear implants in postlingually deafened adults, there is an early emergence of spatial hearing skills. Although nearly all subjects can discriminate source locations to the right versus left, less than half are able to perform the more difficult task of identifying source locations in a multispeaker array. Benefits for speech intelligibility with one versus two implants improve with time, in particular when spatial cues are used to segregate speech and competing noise. Localization and speech-in-noise abilities in this group of patients are somewhat correlated.